November 19th, 2009

Dreamforce post#2: Chatter, Events, REA and the Future of Management

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 9:17 am

Categories: Current Affairs, ERP, Future of Application Software, SaaS and Beyond, Software Events, Software Vendors, The Applications Market, Think About IT, software, software. applications

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Event, Worker, Dennis Howlett, Sales Force Management, Social Networking, Sales, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

I got chatted up yesterday - so should you

Salesforce.com announced its Chatter capability today. In essence, they’ve married instant communication services like Twitter, social networks like Facebook and data/events from corporate IT systems like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com into one integrated application/platform.

Users of Salesforce’s applications will find Chatter a native capability soon. I’ve got a slew of opinions re: this service and here are the positives:

- It’s great to see an application vendor innovate. The fact that people are enthused, engaged and pondering the possibilities of such a solution is something I wish we saw more of in other vendor’s conferences. Dennis Howlett tells me Epicor has created something similar and SAP may have experimented in this area, too.

- Chatter can bring to a business person’s attention all manner of important business events. The ability of the software to pass along key business events emanating out of application systems and databases is particularly welcome. Proponents of REA (Realtime Event Accounting model) will be especially delighted to see this time of technology become available.

On the concern’s side, I worry about these issues:

- Data Overload and Worker Productivity – I’m just not convinced that every worker needs or would benefit from this fountain of information streaming at them non-stop. Sometimes, my best work comes when I step away from all of the distractions and interruptions and concentrate on the task at hand. I don’t want truck drivers reading Facebook updates while on the road. I’m also not convinced that all posts/feeds are valuable. The challenge for the Salesforce.com team will be to develop sophisticated filtering and prioritization tools to make chatter smarter. If Chatter doesn’t improve worker productivity and create value for the enterprise, it could end up getting blocked on corporate networks like some social networking technologies.

- Synthesis – Speaking for myself, I’ve come to loathe certain bulletin boards, IM users, etc. because they do not write effectively. They incorrectly assume that I can somehow read their mind and determine the context of their messages. Equally frustrating is their self-centered view that I have read everything they’ve ever written and remember it. Their communications assume so much context is already present that their newest missives are incomprehensible. I need context and I need someone or a program to structure and synthesize dozens or hundreds of communications to something short, succinct and relevant.

- Conversation vs. Knowledge – Conversation is a luxury. It’s something I do with close colleagues, friends, family and clients. Knowledge is what I need to do my job well. Chatter certainly fills the conversation component well but businesses may need something that converts, filters and/or structures conversation into knowledge. That’s the real challenge and opportunity this kind of technology could bring in time.

- Quality of content - Not all content that is presented to a user of Chatter will be valuable or will be something that the receiver can assist. Yes, users can choose which people they want to Chatter with but still the quality issue will remain. What we’re willing to read in our own time is not what we should be reading during work hours.

Let’s return to the idea of events for a moment. Events in business systems can be internal or external occurrences or data points that warrant a worker’s/executive’s attention. Here are some examples:

- the Federal Reserve moves up the Fed Funds Rate by a full percentage point. This may mean that a company’s cost of capital is going to go up real soon. If it does, a company would want to re-examine its capital expenditure plans, its inventory levels, etc.

- the price of key commodity (e.g., wheat, copper, etc.) goes up/down by 20% in one day’s trading. Should someone in Purchasing, Procurement, Sales, etc. be notified as the company may want to lock in lower prices now or raise prices of finished goods?

- A key customer or supplier has just announced they are in financial difficulty or getting acquired.

- The engineer in your firm with 116 patents to her name has just notified HR that she’s going to go part-time and then go on early retirement.

Business people make decisions based on a number of internal and external events. When certain (not all) changes occur in one’s business environment, some reactions are necessary. Some events create strategic opportunities for the firm but only when they can be acted upon quickly and decisively. This, I believe, is the real opportunity for Chatter. Chatter can turn a moribund, middle-of-the-road firm into a real competitive juggernaut. When Chatter gets event processing fully incorporated into its solution, businesses and management science are in for a real change. For the first time, we could start to see companies managed in real-time.

November 18th, 2009

A Tale of Two Software Worlds: Old ERP vs. SaaS

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 11:20 am

Categories: Current Affairs, ERP, Financial Software, Future of Application Software, HR, Implementing Technology, Selling & Marketing Software, Software Development, Software Marketing, Software Vendors, The Application Software Buyer, The Applications Market, Think About IT, software

Tags: Software, Software-as-a-service, Solution, Customer, ERP, Survivors, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies

Watching the train wreck as SaaS continues its assault on the on-premise software world

Charles Dickens began his famous book “A Tale of Two Cities” with this opening statement:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way, “

This week, I’m in Silicon Valley. Yesterday, a colleague, Dr. Katherine Jones, and I visited with executives from WorkDay, Taleo, Ariba and Financial Force (the Salesforce.com and Unit4/Agresso joint venture). Today, I’m at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event. These visits have confirmed for me what CIOs have already indicated to me: SaaS (software as a service) has really moved mainstream. Big ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors that cannot, will not or are unable to offer these solutions are in trouble. Yet, to hear it from the old school crowd, these firms are:

- still vetting the SaaS space as they aren’t sure it’s for real
- saying that their customers aren’t asking for SaaS
- having trouble retro-fitting their old-premise solution to a SaaS environment
- do not know how to make a solution multi-tenant despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development
- etc.

LET THEM EAT CAKE

Or in this case “let them pay 25% maintenance that generates 90+% margin for us”. The arrogance, indifference or lack of empathy old school vendors have for their customers is appalling. They behave with the imperious attitude of the royalists of yore. But, like the old royalists, they did not recognize that the world around them was changing. Instead, the royalists found themselves increasingly on the other end of a pitchfork, ax or guillotine. The end of an era is coming and vendors can choose to embrace or fight it. But will the fighters win?

In the executive meetings yesterday, Katherine and I heard, consistently, these sentiments:

- Interest in SaaS products is growing rapidly. Vendors find they are challenged by internal concerns (e.g., how to accommodate their sales professionals’ commission problems as these companies are shifting from on-premise to SaaS sales) not market acceptance. Nonetheless, the smart firms don’t let their internal issues impede what their customers want. These vendors are sorting out the issues and moving forward.

- Marketing SaaS products is not a problem for SaaS vendors but successfully implementing the customers they are winning is. SaaS vendors are almost universally focused on building solid customer references as they know that reputation really matters in a space where a few minutes of service disruption could kill one’s brand.
- Market interest in SaaS products is expanding. Once, where customers would entertain some HR or CRM apps running on the cloud, Finance applications are now being seen as very viable solutions to use.

Katherine and I asked these vendors about the software products they are replacing. No surprise here: they are uninstalling old school products – many of the products being replaced were implemented to alleviate Y2K (year 2000) issues. Those aging products, many of which were implemented in the mid-to-late 1990s, are the ones being booted to the curb. More on this in a subsequent post.

Why are the old products falling away? Vendors told us that their customers and prospects are looking to SaaS as:

- The TCO of existing solutions is out of whack. Ever higher maintenance costs were frequently identified as major customer pain point and a driver of SaaS sales.

- Customers don’t like being stuck on older releases because they can’t justify the commitment of funds, time, third parties, etc. to implement upgrades.

- They have run out of time waiting for their old ERP, HR, or Finance software vendor to get on the SaaS bandwagon or deliver long-promised SaaS products.

One SaaS vendor executive described the ‘transition points’ that trigger the initial contact with their firm. These include, but are not limited to:

- The prior old school vendor requires a re-implementation of the product to utilize a new release.
- The old school vendor requires its customers to re-license an application as it is being re-platformed or re-badged.
- The customer is experiencing declining fortunes yet the old school vendor’s license fees and maintenance amounts will not change to reflect the new economic reality.
- The customer is outgrowing the old solution. The number of customers that are now global is huge and growing yet some solutions do not scale in size, functionality or global reach.
- Etc.

CIOs are adding to the market interest as they are choosing to use SaaS applications whenever some of their servers are due for retirement/replacement. CIOs realize that they would like to avoid new capital expenditures, want to have software that always remains current, use software that doesn’t cost them anything to upgrade, use software that frees up their IT staff to work on more strategic matters, etc.

Vendor after vendor reaffirmed for Katherine and me that customers are realizing 50% TCO savings over older on-premise products. (Salesforce did so this morning, too).

Now look at what’s going on at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event. 19,000 people registered for this event. The main auditorium of 10,000 was filled and an overflow room of 3,000 people was filled, too. In this economy, such a large number of people don’t go to a show, miss work and incur travel costs unless they’re serious about the subject.

A crowd of 19,000 people is a lot. Maybe only two or three application software vendors could deliver that kind of crowd. And some of those are struggling to do so as the lack of innovation, the lack of timely delivery of product, the high cost of these passé solutions, etc. makes market interest in these products fade.

Will SaaS displace on-premise solutions? Not entirely. But significant market share losses could start showing up in the next 24 months. Latecomers to SaaS will find their existing customers and new prospects to be especially leery of their solutions. Why? It’s taken Salesforce.com a decade to perfect their platform, their reliability, their sandboxes, etc. Untested SaaS environments will be viewed as risky propositions. CFOs, Controllers, CEOs, etc. will prefer to go with solutions from vendors with a solid track record and credentials in SaaS and the cloud. Newbies will have a really tough time.

Dickens opened his book with the best/worst dichotomies not just to get a reader’s attention but to point out that everyone in France at that time, royalists and peasant, had starkly different opinions of the current situation. Some royalists thought good times were still ahead while others correctly saw the sea change coming. Ditto for the peasants.

Survivors are the ones who correctly assess the market situation. Casualties are the ones who live in denial or in some unrealistic but idealized view of the world. Old school, on-premise vendors are in trouble. Of that I have no doubt. What amazes me is the level of denial still present in some of those firms. Pain is coming to those firms soon.

October 22nd, 2009

Sustainability: Hard for business, harder for ERP vendors

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 11:08 am

Categories: Current Affairs, ERP, Future of Application Software, Think About IT, software, software. applications

Tags: Sustainability, ERP Vendor, ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Software, Software, Brian Sommer

“Everyone, we’’re currently meeting with customers to see what sort of requirements they might have in the sustainability space. With this input, we hope to someday craft a reporting solution to help customers understand what their carbon consumption really is.”

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE

ERP vendors don’t get sustainability. They think it’s about collecting all of a user’s electric and gas bills to determine their carbon footprint. They think it’s a reporting exercise. If they can develop a spreadsheet with more rows and columns than the next ERP vendor, then they have achieved some sort of market leading, product excellence crown of achievement.

NO

Putting sustainability into ERP solutions will be very intrusive, very disruptive and expensive, if it is done correctly. Why? Well, sustainability requires new ways of looking at:

- which products to make
- what the true costs of a product are including costs for carbon offsets
- which production facilities should/should not be used to achieve optimal business, financial and ecologic outcomes
- how product scheduling should be optimized to take advantage of lower emission, lower carbon generating, etc. plants and machinery
- etc.

Let’s examine this further. In an ERP solution today, does a cost accounting module account for carbon offset costs as part of a product’s actual or standard cost? No. Some solutions might allow for a user to add a new cost item for this but can the system automatically drop in the correct cost based on:

- the specific machinery used (some machines use more energy than others)
- the time of day the product was made (i.e., some products may be made at night with hydroelectric power instead of daytime production using natural gas powered electricity)
- the location where the product was made (i.e., some facilities have naturally lower energy consumption or take advantage of solar/wind energy)
- whether recycled or virgin packaging was used
- etc.

Pre-sustainability cost accounting is passé in the new world. Cost accounting needs to be re-worked.

Now look at production scheduling algorithms. These optimization formulas were created to simultaneously solve several variables to produce optimal production schedules. These algorithms try to reduce the amount of machine down time, increase the likelihood of customers receiving promised products on time and meeting the target cost requirements of the products to be made. But these algorithms were not designed to assess the carbon footprint of each product that could be produced. These algorithms will need to be re-worked.

Look at the product quotation module. This functionality lets a product or design engineer build out a product specification, cost it out and price it. It helps companies, especially make-to-order manufacturers, decide what to make and how much to charge for it. As designed, these systems do not explicitly support additional cost concerns that sustainability might introduce. How would a package help a product designer/engineer determine where a product should be built, what machinery should be used, etc. to achieve needed profit levels while also incurring low carbon offset costs, low impact on the environment, etc.? This functionality needs to be re-worked, too.

In all, I believe ERP vendors will need to re-work their fixed assets, order entry, job costing, production scheduling, logistics, transportation management and many more applications if their solutions are to really support sustainability. It might be easier to determine which modules won’t be impacted by sustainability than to identify the ones that are.

When I heard a major ERP representative give a comment like the one at the top of the post, I was apoplectic. This firm was approaching sustainability in manner consistent with adding some minor, bolt-on functionality to the core product. They didn’t realize that these changes will be significant and when new legislation for sustainability (e.g., Cap and Trade) kicks in, their customers will need it (all) immediately. Customers will not have the luxury of time to wait for this ERP vendor to:

- spend a year or two collecting requirements from a few ‘strategic’ customers
- spend another year ‘studying’ these requirements and getting approvals for development work to proceed
- spend two-three more years developing the needed functionality for the initial release
- spend another year hand-holding the alpha/beta version of the product with a limited release group of customers
- then, finally, after seven years or so finally start rolling out a functionally light or insignificant version of the product to the general market.

No, sustainability is not like analytics. It won’t be something you can bolt to the exterior of the ERP suite and add a little something to it every few months. Sustainability functionality will be big, disruptive and important. When it is needed, all of the functionality will be needed at once.

Sustainability is a great example of what’s wrong with innovation in ERP today. Vendors have forgotten how to innovate. The fact that this ERP representative is asking customers and bloggers for ideas and items to put on their development list is appalling. The vendor should already know, by their own assessment, what needs to change in their product line to support sustainability. If they have to ask me, they are doomed.

Innovation is not (and please understand this point) about order-taking but you’d swear that’s how ERP vendors see it. Innovation involves imagination, empathy and the anticipation of future market needs/demands/wants. That’s the part ERP vendors don’t get.

October 8th, 2009

Selling that Technology: Functions, Features & Fools

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 10:07 am

Categories: Fun With Tech, Humor, Marketing, Selling & Marketing Software, Selling & Marketing Software, Software Marketing, sales, software

Tags: Advertisement, Vendor, Sunshine, Data Centers, Sales Strategy, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Sales, Brian Sommer

Post 2 – What we saw at the HR Technology show

Katherine Jones and I got a lot of pitches from technology companies at the recent HR Technology show in Chicago. Each of us asked vendors “What are the top 3 things we should remember about your firm?” and often we were met with:

(a) blank stares,
(b) a litany of functions and features, or,
(c) that rarest of all, a polished set of messages any analyst or prospect would love.

Since Katherine took the lead in yesterday’s post, here’s my take on what’s wrong with function/feature selling. Does any of this apply to your technology firm?

The Pareto rule usually applies here as 80% of the technology pitches I get aren’t that good. The solutions are derivative, unoriginal or packaged poorly. Sometimes, the presenters are pretty bad, too. But, thankfully, 1 in 5 might actually have a couple of good nuggets within them.

I like vendors that understand who they are, the customers they serve, how their solutions add value and what direction/vision these companies have for the future. Their stories aren’t just interesting, they’re engaging and relevant. Marketers and sales people love these companies as it’s easy to sell something that sells itself. Marry great positioning with talented sales people and you’ve got a potential best seller on your hands.

Technology marketers often sell functions and features. Their copy and presentations are choked with TLAs (three letter acronyms). You’d get a headache reading the stuff if only you could understand it. Here’s the way many of you start your pitch with me:

____________________________________________________________________

Vendor: “Brian, glad you could make the call today. We’re introducing a revolutionary new upgrade to our 37-year old data center management product: B-Zerko. This tape backup and punch card scheduler now has a virtualized human interface that permits remote SOA in a non-SQL platform on quad-core processors. Additionally, we’ve added support for flat-files, virtual tapes and semantic scheduling of off-line paradigms. We think customers are really going to see the value these new capabilities bring to this product.”

Me: “Really? You think customers will go crazy for this?”

Vendor: “Absolutely – We’re even telling our VCs to get the IPO ready! This one is going big time!”

Me: “Does this upgraded product have a new name?”

Vendor: “When it was in our development lab, we called it Project Boring. But, now that we need to sell this baby, we’re calling it the B-Zerko Annihilator!”

Me: “Does it slice, dice and make julienne fries? Does it come with a bamboo wok steamer?”

Vendor: “Better! It now comes with 44% more acronyms. Several of which we’ve invented just for this product. For example, we’re telling customers about IVD – Infinite Value Delivery – that’s the time it will take for customers to get any real value from this solution. We’re also discussing Q-squared. This stands for Questionable Quality. This software is still in pre-Alpha so we’re not sure it’s working yet. However, Q-squared lets our customers take advantage of our most dangerous, unsupported and dubious products as early as possible.”

Me: “I get it that you’re excited about this. But how do you know that customers really need this now?”

Vendor: “Brian, baby, we’ve been collecting user requirements for over 34 years. This new product version incorporates some of the features people have been wanting for over two decades.”

Me: “Such as….”

Vendor: “Like a stable release, like a release that works on the customer’s technical platform. Do you know we sold over 22,000 copies of this to customers with CICS/VSAM environments and our product didn’t support this? Now it does – sorta.”

Me: “So you’re just getting around to honoring commitments made decades ago?”

Vendor: “Hey, it’s not like we lied or anything. Every vendor does it. But, now we can say that we have tested this product for over 30 years. Most of the bugs have got to be out of it by now”

Me: “So what’s next? What’s the future hold?”

Vendor: “Glad you asked. Lately, we’ve been hearing there’s a lot of buzz around two new, emerging technologies. I don’t know if you’ve heard about them but they’re called the Internet and cellular phones.”

Me: “Are you sure they’ve got staying power?”

Vendor: “We’re still on a wait and see status for them and this other thing called Unix. We’ll schedule another briefing when we think they’re gonna pop.”

Me: “Well, be sure and do that then. Oh, look at the time! I’ve got to run to another call”

______________________________________________________________________________

What technology marketers need to do is steal a page from the consumer products marketers. They need to sell the ‘experience’ of using a great technology not its functions and features. They need to cultivate the ‘feeling’ one has once they strap on the industry leading accounting package. That sort of marketing is called ‘experiential’ marketing.

Here’s how it works.

McDonalds did the ultimate function/feature ad years ago. It featured a hamburger’s bill of materials set to music. Who doesn’t remember: “ two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun”? Later, they went experiential. Those ads showed scenes like a dad and his son near the store window, having breakfast. The sunshine is beaming in through the window, the son is thinking about the soccer game he played and the dad is beaming with pride. What McDonald’s isn’t doing is touting the calories in that sausage biscuit the dad is eating. They are trying to connect their product with good memories.

Coca-Cola did the same thing with the young folks on top of a mountain singing “I’d like to teach the world to sing…”. If Coca-Cola was sold using the function/feature approach, we’d get an announcer proudly declaring the percentage of corn fructose syrup, caramel coloring, caffeine and other ingredients found in the 20 oz. polycarbonate container replete with a reusable, plastic screw top fastener. Try and convince me that function/feature advertising for soft drinks sounds appealing. It isn’t for soda pop and it isn’t for technology.

I saw a car ad that simply showed a good looking, 40-ish couple driving a convertible down California’s Pacific Coast Highway in the twilight hours. They were enjoying the drive and the creature comforts of this vehicle. Not a word is spoken during the ad. Only the car maker’s logo appears at the end of the spot. If a technology marketer got to do this pitch, it would be a loud recitation of the function/features of the car’s engine. We’d hear all about the engine’s gaskets, its chrome/moly piston rings, its 4-valves per cylinder, etc. and we’d be bored to tears. Mind you, some of us might want to hear it but most want to live the life of the good-looking guy driving the hot car with the hot babe down that highway.

So, you’re going to call on your next technology sales pigeon/prospect. What’s your approach going to be: function/feature or experiential? I sure hope it’s the latter.

September 16th, 2009

Interview with Microsoft’s Seth Patton

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 4:49 pm

Categories: PPM - Project Portfolio Management, PSA - Professional Services Automation, Professional Services, Service Providers, Software Vendors, software

Tags: Microsoft Corp., PPM, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Brian Sommer

More from the Project Conference

Seth Patton is the senior marketing director for Microsoft Project. I got thirty minutes alone with Seth at the Microsoft Project Conference 2009 show this afternoon.

We discussed several topics impacting the PSA (professional services automation) and PPM (project portfolio management) software space. Here are the highlights from that conversation:

1) How will Project 2010 impact other PPM competitors? Seth and I discussed how the 2010 version of Microsoft Project makes the solution more competitive with existing PPM solutions, especially those targeting the SMB (small-medium business) market. Independent software vendors in that space will definitely feel more competition from Microsoft. More specifically, these vendors will see more energized competition from Microsoft vast army of channel partners. Seth discussed how Microsoft customers are desirous of solutions that take advantage of other Microsoft products like SharePoint, Office, Exchange, etc. Many customers are looking to consolidate or reduce the number of software vendors they are dealing with. As Microsoft’s Project technologies continue to improve, Microsoft may continue to drive out more independent software vendors from customers’ IT departments.

2) Why did Microsoft make so many ease of use and interoperability improvements to this product? Seth discussed how making the product easier to use means more people can utilize the product immediately. By reducing the product’s learning curve, Microsoft expands the potential user base. More novices and more users in different sized firms are now target customers for Project 2010.

3) How will Project 2010 interoperate with other ERP and PPM solutions? Better than before. Avnet is integrating Project with SAP application software. Seth indicated that they are moving time sheet data between the two systems. Project 2010 will come with out-of-the-box integration with two MBS (Microsoft Business Solutions) accounting products: Dynamics SL (nee Solomon) and Axapta.

4) Are professional services firms using Project or are they using PSA products instead? According to Seth, several large services are big users of Project. He specifically mentioned CSC and EDS as two examples of this. While PPM products, Microsoft’s included, contain many of the functions needed by professional services firms, they are still some key functions not available within Project just yet. These include: client billing; dedicated time entry for vendor, client, contractors, etc.; two-way interfaces with payroll systems; proposal tools; and, more. Nonetheless, Seth reminded me that thousands of Microsoft partners are service firms as well as users of Project in client work.

5) Is Microsoft seeing an uptick in Project sales due to ARRA (American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009)? Seth stated that they have seen some big deals pop in on the big federal deals but state and local action has been minimal to date.

6) Does Microsoft have anything to report on the NPD (new product development) front? Microsoft has struck deals with PLM vendors. One of these is PTC. If you are into this functionality, you should also check out Planview’s and CA’s offerings here.

I’ll do one more post tomorrow after Gary Hamel speaks. Until then…

September 16th, 2009

More on Microsoft Project 2010

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 1:37 pm

Categories: PPM - Project Portfolio Management, PSA - Professional Services Automation, Professional Services, Software Vendors, software

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Corp., Capability, Collaboration, Content Management, Groupware, Microsoft Project, Team Management, Enterprise Software, Software

The Completeness of the PPM Solution Grows

(More from the Project Conference 2009 in Phoenix)

As the demonstrations of Project 2010 continue, I noted the following:

1) Microsoft has added a lot of functionality in its Resource Management and Time Entry components. The resource management capability gives project managers, staffing professionals and others a lot of visibility into the project conflicts, overbookings, under-utilization, etc. of potential team members. I have seen slicker capabilities in some high-end PSA (professional services automation) systems but the version I saw today is a big jump in capability compared to the older version of Project that is on my desktop computer. Likewise, time entry capabilities are slicker. Microsoft even added a well-controlled/secured ability to let a project manager enter time for sick team members or third party team members who do not have access to the software.

2) Project 2010 has functionality to support: Demand Management, Portfolio Selection, Resource Management, Schedule Management, Business Intelligence and more. As I posted earlier today, the product is no longer just a project tracking/management tool. It’s a PPM (project portfolio management) tool.

3) Connecting Project 2010 to SharePoint opens up additional capabilities for users. Specifically, SharePoint brings Collaboration, Project Portal, Knowledge Management and other capabilities to this PPM solution. While SharePoint integration is not entirely new to the product, the enhanced capabilities, easier tailoring and more powerful reporting are. These improvements make the product a stronger player against other PPM solutions on the market.

Users of this software might need four components: Project Web Access (to access project data on the go (i.e., via laptop, cell phone, etc.), Project 2010 Professional for the desktop/laptop (to do more complex project tasks), Project 2010 Server (to execute key processes and facilitate the sharing/updating of shared project data), and, SharePoint Server (to facilitate project portals/web pages, collaboration, etc.).

More to follow….

September 15th, 2009

Interesting things I've been briefed on lately...

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 12:47 pm

Categories: Current Affairs, ERP, Mergers & Acquisitions, PPM - Project Portfolio Management, PSA - Professional Services Automation, Professional Services, SaaS and Beyond, Software Vendors, Sourcing, The Applications Market, software, software. applications

Tags: Food, Open Source, Information Technology, NetSuite Inc., Computer Associates International Inc., iTrade Network, Meridian Project Systems, UC4, Food & Beverage, Manufacturing

NetSuite, CA, iTrade Network, Meridian Project Systems, UC4, Project Open,….

NetSuite has some new financial consolidation/planning functionality in their SaaS solution. It permits global firms to handle currency conversion. Adaptive Planning’s software is at the core of this solution. This technology does not currently use an in-core memory resident database. The more of this sort of advanced financial capability that NetSuite builds into its products, the more upmarket they’ll become.

iTrade Network is the result of three related firms coming together to solve an important problem in the food industry. iTrade is providing the traceability needed in this sector to protect us, food manufacturers and distributors and others from problems in our food supply. Their solution can expedite recalls and hopefully drive a more complete and accurate removal of contaminated products from the selves. The company has already attracted a lot of big name customers. Last year, I did a white paper for SYSPRO on the food sector. Product recalls were one of the most contentious issues that I discussed in that piece.

ARRA (American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009)– You’ve likely seen this acronym on a road project near you. In fact, my daughter and I recently drove from Colorado to Chicago and we passed a lot of construction sites benefiting from these rehabilitation monies. Meridian Project Systems briefed me many months ago about this and now CA is out there with their Grants Management functionality. CA’s solution is an offshoot of their PPM solution (nee Clarity). Meridian has scheduled a more detailed briefing with me later this week.

UC4 has put the 2.0 moniker on something called Automation 2.0 for the IT data center. Their software puts all kinds of scheduled tasks under a single, integrated toolset. Why is this technology needed? Just look at how many different applications and activities IT groups support now versus a 10-15 years ago? Email archiving, CRM applications, web applications, data resident on SaaS systems, etc. are all relatively new IT responsibilities. Each of these requires backups, report runs and other processes and they all must be scheduled. IT shops don’t need to buy a different scheduler for every database, application, reporting tool, etc. IT data center personnel should experience greater productivity and should be available to work on more strategic initiatives. UC4 claims a 6-12 month ROI.

UC4 also acquired an event-driven technology, SENACTIVE, to complement its offerings.

Project Open is an open source project portfolio management solution based out of Europe. The software has attracted a fair following there and is used by a number of professional services firms (e.g., Cambridge Technology Partners). The software is frequently used in an on-premise mode although hosted versions are available from the firm or selected partners. I only had time for a cursory examination but the functionality appears fairly robust for service groups of 20+ people. It’s a PSA/PPM option for those looking at open source solutions.

September 8th, 2009

Imagine that! More innovation in PPM

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 10:25 am

Categories: Current Affairs, PPM - Project Portfolio Management, PSA - Professional Services Automation, software

Tags: Innovation, Software, PlanView, Tools & Techniques, Product Marketing, Project Management, Management, Marketing, It Operations, It service Management

When Ideation Meets Project Management

Innovation in the PSA/PPM space was missing for much of this decade. Professional Services Automation software and Project Portfolio Management software had fallen into a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) status for a while.

That’s definitely changed lately.

The use of PPM software to develop new products is a hot idea for this space. The software you use to manage projects can now be used to manage R&D efforts and solicit input for new product development.

This last year, I was briefed by both CA and Planview as to their respective NPD (new product development) capabilities. Last week, Planview upped the ante by announcing new functionality to enable the capture of customer input, employee input, etc. in the creation of new products or extensions to existing products.

I’ve seen firms use this type of capability before. Dell has a solution (built on Salesforce.com technology) to capture customer ideas re: their products. Planview’s approach is a bit different in that the solution integrates with their project management tools. I like the integration because just capturing ideas isn’t enough. You need to get new ideas and flow them into the development cycles/plans.

August 3rd, 2009

Stories that warrant watching: SPSS, HP, Acer, Google, SAP, Oracle, NetSuite

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 9:18 am

Categories: Current Affairs, Future of Application Software, Google, Mergers & Acquisitions, Oracle, SAP, SaaS and Beyond, Software Financial Stats, Software Vendors, The Applications Market, Think About IT, Web/Tech, internet, software

Tags: Google Inc., Software-as-a-service, Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp., NetSuite Inc., SPSS Inc., SAP AG, Acer Inc., Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting

Wedding bells for a Chicago software firm

Last week, IBM offered to pay $1.2 billion for SPSS, nee Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. SPSS was one of those niche firms with a lot of brilliant folks on board. They possessed a number of slick apps that few knew of or understand but nonetheless made millions for their users.

If IBM’s smart about this deal, they’ll keep the talent and push this technology, the modeling and advanced analytics, etc. into every vertical they can. IBM should also push the envelope on their technology and make this stuff as technically relevant as possible. Click for more from The Standard on this.

Acer, HP, Google Android and Google Chrome

The Standard reported that Acer was dropping the development of an Atom based netbook running Google’s Android. Acer and HP may develop netbooks based on Google’s Chrome. Google could become a real nuisance to Microsoft if it fields a market relevant desktop OS. This is a story to watch especially if application developers can be recruited to code for this platform.

SAP & Oracle Earnings (& Pricing)

SAP earnings were announced this week. The company’s revenues could be better but the firm is apparently ably managed and its operating margins even went up. Comparisons to same quarter revenues last year may be a bit unfair as that was one heck of a quarter and the last quarter whose results weren’t totally clocked due to the recession.

Oracle a few weeks ago boasted record 41% operating margins. FierceCIO reported recent price hikes by Oracle even in the face of a recession. I enjoyed the first paragraph of their article:

These are tough times and managers are trying to keep expenses down, but apparently no one told that to Oracle.

Oracle took an amazingly risky step, by raising the cost of some of its management options for its flagship database by 40 percent, according to a pricing list available on July 1, InfoWorld reports.

Now let’s compare those financial results to a SaaS vendor…

NetSuite Earnings

I listened in to the NetSuite earnings call late last week. The story at this application software vendor was decidedly more upbeat overall and it was really better by new revenue standards as compared to traditional on-premise providers.

NetSuite is also generating free cash flow from operations now. The company also indicated that is working a big services customer deal in Europe which has the potential for a 9000 seat customer.

As one of the better known and larger SaaS (software as a service) vendors, NetSuite benefits by the continuing rising tide that SaaS brings. Having large systems integrators and outsourcers legitimizing SaaS also helps the space. CIOs are now more comfortable and more knowledgeable about SaaS and I’d expect more CIOs to ask vendors like NetSuite this question: “Can you deliver for me big company SaaS expertise and mature solutions while maintaining the SaaS cloud cost structure of someone like Amazon or Google?” Yes, I think smarter CIOs are going to demand that vendors provide not just a SaaS solution but an inexpensive one, too! Maybe I’ll get to ask that question at their next earnings call….

July 29th, 2009

Alignment vs. Agreement - Which is better?

Posted by Brian Sommer @ 5:27 pm

Categories: Fun With Tech, HR, Web/Tech, negotiate, negotiations, software, software. applications

Tags: Alignment, Human Resources, Agreement, TalentSphere, Brian Sommer

An Interesting Development from a HR software firm

TalentSphere is a HR software firm that has some interesting intellectual property and an interesting approach to achieving alignment between workers and the companies that employ them. They help firms achieve greater alignment between business strategies and workers’ needs/wants. They also have some creative approaches to help employers find the right kind of workers and match them to the right kind of work situation. When such a match occurs, it is hoped that job stability is increased, employee morale increases and the costs associated with turnover and replacement recruiting plummet.

TalentSphere has apparently been working on a broader application where it helps any two parties achieve ‘agreement’. Agreement is much deeper, fundamental and permanent than alignment. You and your employer may be aligned today but business needs and strategies (like personal needs and wants) change so frequently that alignment is sometimes a transitory goal. A good goal but one that needs lots of re-connecting to ensure it’s still relevant.

Agreement works when two parties want to do something together. They seek a mutual meeting of the minds. When this is achieved, an agreement can be consummated. Great agreements occur when the parties agree to all of the details of an event, contract, etc. They agree on the big items and all the arcane aspects, too.

TalentSphere has something in beta that you might like to try (and it’s free for now). It called ShakeTool. The software lets one party contact another and suggest that they might want to work together to achieve some kind of an agreement. Are you in need of mending a marriage or negotiating a contract for a new roof on your house? Try this product. It lets each side enter in their needs and concerns. Either party can suggest and improve on these terms until both sides agree to a given term. There are no limits as to the number of terms and once each is agreed to, the parties ’shake’ on that item.

I suspect this tool could be useful in HR situations and in other applications. I’m not sure it will always work in the large capital expenditure deals I negotiate as these are often adversarial. But, I’ll keep an open mind.

Hey, it’s in beta and it’s free. Let’s kick the tires…